From: Marita LaMonica <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 1 May 2014 10:33:53 -0400

The Data Conservancy, IEEE, and Portico receive Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation grant to connect publications and their linked data

New York, NY April 30, 2014 The Data Conservancy, IEEE, and Portico
announced today their partnership to design and prototype a data
curation infrastructure that connects published research and
associated data sets for the long-term benefit of researchers
worldwide. This two-year project, which is supported by a $602,000
grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will result in the
development of a service that will build, store, update, and retrieve
the connections among publications and data, and preserve those
connections over the long-term.

Scholarly digital publications increasingly consist of distinct
building blocks, including text, graphics, and data, which often
reside in different repositories and are maintained by different
institutions, employing different technologies. These components have
many, and evolving, relationships that must be preserved over time.
This project will make it possible to preserve not just these
publications and their underlying data, but the complex relationships
among them, thereby supporting the continual development of scholarly
communication and digital publishing. A publisher who wants to know if
there are reference links to data for a publication, for example,
submits article metadata and identifiers to the service, which returns
any relationships it finds, thus making it possible to track and
preserve these connections through the scholarly communications cycle.

Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for research data management and
Hodson director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the
Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University, noted, “We believe
that the models developed as a result of this project will enable new
forms of scholarly communication, and thus help to set the stage for
the future of research and digital publishing. Our partnership
represents broad perspectives and multifaceted experience, which we
believe will result in more meaningful solutions that can be
generalized for the entire community.”

“The research community has an immediate and pressing need to make the
most effective use of the relationship between publications and their
corresponding data,” commented Kate Wittenberg, managing director of
Portico. “As scholars continue to explore the possibilities presented
by these relationships, it is incumbent on us, their colleagues, to
develop a creative vision and infrastructure to support their work.”

The Data Conservancy, a data curation organization; IEEE, the world’s
largest technical professional organization and publisher of nearly a
third of the world’s technical literature in electrical engineering,
computer science, and electronics; and Portico, a digital preservation
service, bring together years of experience in digital scholarship,
publishing, and preservation. The research work will build on the
existing infrastructure, expertise, and relationships they have
developed over time. In the initial phase, project leaders will gather
requirements from members of the publishing and scholarly communities
engaged in research across the physical sciences, social sciences, and
humanities.

“Our aim is not only to preserve publications and data—either
separately or together—but to preserve the relationships among them,”
commented Gerry Grenier, senior director of publishing technologies at
IEEE. “This project represents a big step forward in greater
discovery, access, and preservation.”

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